Ministry of Environment team rescues green turtle, return it to its environment

The regional branch of the environmental affairs agency in Alexandria released on Tuesday night rescued a green sea turtle from the hands one of the merchants in Al-Seyouf district in the coastal city and returned it back to its environment.

According to a statement from the Ministry of Environment on Wednesday, the rescue operation came in cooperation with the environment police and Alexandria team for rescuing turtles and wildlife.

The green turtle faces danger of extinction globally for different reasons including global warming.

In Egypt, green turtles are called ‘Tirsa’ and a lot of people believe that it has health benefits especially for sexual health, whereby it is a target for fishermen who sell it to restaurants.

Sea turtles or green turtles are facing a gender crisis as most of the surviving turtles now are females, which threaten the life of those turtles and put them on the map of species that are under the threat of extinction.

In January, alarming results from a recent gender ratio study revealed that 99% of young green turtles from Australia’s Northern Great Barrier Reef are female and that male sea turtles are disappearing.

Closer to Australia, researchers from Florida Atlantic University have documented a similar trend in sea turtle hatchlings in southeast Florida. Since 2002, they have studied sea turtles in Palm Beach County and discovered that 97% to 100% of the hatchlings were female.

Egypt is one of the countries that signed the international agreement for preserving green turtles in 1975, and Article 28 of law number 4 of environment bans the sale or hunting of the species that are under the threat of extinction.